CA Application Performance Management Healthcheck

Managing change in your IT environment can be challenging, especially for keeping pace with evolving business demands and IT environments. CA Application Performance Management Healthcheck (CA APM Healthcheck) assesses the current state of your IT environment in order to identify opportunities for improved performance and effectiveness.

Business Challenges

IT organizations are under tremendous pressure to deliver more services at a faster rate while providing a flawless end-user experience. Composite applications span environments, increasing the importance for IT organizations to strive for optimal performance, provide the quality experience that end users demand and reduce complexity. IT organizations are challenged to:

Reduce the frequency of application slowdowns and downtimes that can result in user dissatisfaction, lost productivity and lost revenue.

Improve mean time to repair (MTTR) by reducing the time spent in war-room approaches to troubleshooting the root cause of performance issues.

Increase visibility to accurately pinpoint performance problems.

Key Outcomes

Improve operational efficiencies.

Increase response times for greater system productivity.

Identify opportunities to improve system performance for more value from CA APM solution.

Align the CA APM implementation with best practices and current business and technical requirements.

Have the system architecture requirements to support scaling for projected growth.

Key Service Features

Review of original objectives for CA APM versus the current state

Validation for configuration, use cases and solution environments

Recommended strategies and options to extend and enhance existing implementation

Presentation of findings and recommendations designed to help optimize business and technology value of CA APM implementation

Offering Overview

The CA APM Healthcheck service is a detailed diagnostic engagement that evaluates the current state of deployed CA APM products and the underlying infrastructure. CA APM Healthcheck focuses in detail on technical vitality, as well as related procedures that may contribute to platform instability.

This service reviews the current state of the deployed CA APM products and recommends specific technical remediation and optimization activities. This activity is especially beneficial if the performance or stability of APM products are of concern or in anticipation of an upgrade or with the introduction of new workload.

CA APM Healthcheck includes assessment of the following:

Infrastructure architecture hosting CA APM products

Current version levels of deployed CA APM components

Configuration of CA APM components and underlying infrastructure

Storage allocation

Portal usage and configuration

Metric collection

Foundation Services

CA APM Healthcheck reviews an existing CA APM Cluster to verify that it is meeting performance and stability goals. Generally, the health check reviews the operating characteristics and established KPIs and collects summary views at six hours and at 30-day historical ranges to document trends and recent abnormal or undesirable behaviors. Once individual enterprise managers are evaluated in isolation, failover events are documented and each collector is placed in contrast with each other. Agent configurations are overviewed, searching for excessive metrics and a summary of the nature of the agent configuration is completed.

The CA APM Healthcheck Report is prepared, with a presentation that includes:

A summary of which environments were examined

Identification for each cluster:

– Its correct or abnormal operation, including number of agents managed, number of historical metrics encountered, number of workstation users and overall trend of usage

– Details of the hardware platform hosting the various enterprise manager instances

A list of recommendations to tune or remediate the APM cluster performance and capacity

Delivery Options

There are two delivery options available:

Onsite Data Gathering: The Services Architect works onsite with the customer’s APM team to gather the required data about the current CA APM implementation. The Architect performs the data analysis and forms the recommendations offsite. The report can be delivered onsite to give the stakeholders the opportunity to discuss its contents and next steps with the Architect, or it can be sent by e-mail with the option of a Web conference session to discuss the contents of the report.

Offsite Data Gathering: This activity can be delivered entirely remotely. If hands-on access to the CA APM environment is not permitted, a CA Services Architect guides the customer administrator through performing the activities and actions needed to gather the data, along with the provision of a data collection template. The Architect then analyzes the data and forms the recommendations.